Tammy Swenson Lepper
View Tammy’s full academic profile and LinkedIn profile.
Tammy serves as Internship Director in Communication Studies and as a faculty liaison for the Individualized Studies program.
Educational Background
- PhD: Speech Communication | University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
- MA: Speech Communication | University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
- BA: Speech Communication and English | Concordia College, Moorhead
Personal Statement
I joined the faculty at Winona State University in
Fall 2004. Prior to teaching at WSU, I taught at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida, for several years.
You are probably wondering how I got from Florida to Minnesota. I grew up on a small potato and grain farm in northwestern Minnesota (30 miles from Canada and 20 miles from North Dakota) and went to college at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. I pursued my Masters and PhD at the University of Minnesota, where I met my husband, who was in the Navy ROTC program.
During his 11 years of active duty as a Navy helicopter pilot, we lived in the Twin Cities, San Diego, CA, and Pensacola, FL. He is currently a pilot and the Aviation Training Manager for Mayo One in Rochester. We have two daughters, Hannah and Rachel, and a dog named Aggie.
Professional Statement
At WSU, I teach a variety of courses including Health Communication, Organizational Communication, Small Group Communication, Communication Ethics and Diversity, Communication Ethics in a Networked World, Research Methods, Intro to Speech Communication, and a bunch of others. I most enjoy teaching courses where students can actively engage with the material we are studying.
I particularly enjoy serving as the Internship Director for the Communication Studies Department. In that role, I have supervised over 120 student internships in a wide variety of workplaces. To learn more about internships in Communication Studies, you can visit the Communication Studies WordPress blog.
As a scholar, I am most interested in communication ethics. I want to know how we can be effective communicators, while also considering the effects of our communication on others. Most of my published work is about ethical sensitivity (the ability to perceive ethical issues) in communication situations, with other publications about the use of service-learning in communication studies courses.